Did `Non-Profit' MacArthur Foundation Profit From NYC Gentrification-Co-op-Condominium Conversion In 1980s?

The Chicago-based 'non-profit" MacArthur "Genius Grant" Foundation apparently made a lot of money, historically, during the 1980's from the gentrification process in Manhattan and the conversion of apartment building rental units into co-op or condominium units in Manhattan, Queens and Great Neck. As The Assassination Of New York by Robert Fitch recalled in 1993:

"One of the biggest industries in the city had been throwing people out of their apartments--`condo conversion' it was called...The MacArthur Foundation...got involved. A team from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation converted thousands of apartments in the boom years. MacArthur managed to unload its total inventory in 1985 for about $500 MILLION..."

Among the apartment buildings converted into co-ops or condominiums by the "non-profit" and "philanthropic" MacArthur Foundation's real estate deal were "the eight buildings of Lincoln Towers, on the West Side between 66th and 70th streets; nine other buildings in Manhattan, mainly in the East 66s and 70s, and two properties outside Manhattan--Silver Towers apartments in Kew Gardens, Queens, and Great Neck Terrace in Great Neck, Long Island." (New York Times 6/13/93).

MacArthur "Genius Grant" Foundation's Historical Harry Helmsley Real Estate Connection Revisited

"A consortium closed on the purchase of the development from the John D. and Catherine MacArthur Foundation, which had been the partner in the complex with the late Harry B. Helmsley. The price was $215 million..."

--The New York Times on December 28, 1997

Every year the Chicago-based "non-profit" and tax-exempt MacArthur Foundation board of directors commits itself to transferring $625,000 over a 5-year period to each individual "MacArthur Fellow" who is undemocratically nominated by secret nominators and recommended by secret selection committee members to receive an individual "genius grant."

Yet although the MacArthur Foundation--whose current assets exceed $6.4 billion--claims to be a "non-profit" organization, much of its "genius grant" money apparently was derived from the real estate industry profits it obtained as a result of owning the Fresh Meadows Development's rental apartment complex in Queens, in partnership with the now-deceased billionaire Harry Helmsley, until 1995.

Over 10,000 New York City tenants lived in the 3,287 rental units of the 140-building Fresh Meadows apartment complex that Billionaire John D. MacArthur and Helmsley bought in October 1972; and between 1972 and 1995 MacArthur or the MacArthur Foundation--that assumed control of an estimated $1 billion of John D. MacArthur's assets following his death in January 1978--  owned 40 percent of the Fresh Meadows Development, before the MacArthur Foundation increased its ownership to 100 percent between 1995 and 1997, by purchasing Helmsley's 60 percent stake. Then, by selling its 100 percent ownership stake to the Witkoff Group, the Insignia Financial Group and the Federal Realty Investment Trust in December 1997, the "non-profit" MacArthur Foundation was apparently able to obtain an additional $215 million to add to its total assets in the late 1990's.

After John D. MacArthur and Helmsley bought the real estate in October 1972, maintenance services declined, elevators became defective, air-conditioning fees and snow removal complaints increased and a tenants association was formed which organized rent strikes and filed lawsuits against the MacArthur-Helmsley partnership. In his 1989 book, The Ultra Rich: How Much Is Too Much?, Vance Packard noted that "New York realtor and billionaire Harry Helmsley called real estate attractive because `You don't have to do anything. You just have to sit. The values go up.'"

When the MacArthur "Genius Grant" Foundation jointly-owned the Fresh Meadows apartment complex with Harry Helmsley, its Fresh Meadows real estate managers apparently historically discriminated against African-American applicants. As Palace Coup: The Inside Story of Harry and Leona Helmsley by Michael Moss recalled in 1989:

"...One Fresh Meadows case in particular stood out. It was brought by the NAACP, and the issue was racial discrimination...The suit, filed in 1983, had some biting affidavits...Valerie Stroud, a police officer, testified...`It was my understanding that...Fresh Meadows did not rent to Black people.'

"Helmsley and the NAACP avoided a costly trial by agreeing to a settlement that both prohibited Helmsley from refusing to rent on the basis of race and required him to take a number of steps to encourage minorities to apply. A year later the NAACP was back in court, accusing Helmsley of violating the agreement by trying to convert the apartments into co-ops. Helmsley again settled the matter...The Open Housing Center, a non-profit citizens group monitoring Fresh Meadows, estimated that the number of Black families rose from less than one percent..."

History of British Working-Class's Daily Newspaper--Part 2

History of British Working-Class's Daily Newspaper--Part 1

Australian Anti-War Activist Joan Coxsedge's September 24, 2017 Letter

The following letter from Australian anti-war and Latin American solidarity activist Joan Coxsedge--who is also a former member of the Victoria state parliament--originally appeared in an Australian-Cuban solidarity group's newsletter.

   

“September 24, 2017

“Dear Comrades

“I want to thank everyone who supported me during this difficult time. Cedric died on Sunday September 10. After a difficult year health-wise, he’d been in hospital for almost three weeks fighting yet another infection, perhaps multiple infections, and been given hefty doses of antibiotics and subjected to numerous tests, but it became clear he wasn’t responding, so we faced the heartbreaking decision of removing all life support and letting him die in peace.

“We sent him off in great style, celebrating his life at the Unitarian Church. It was warm and personal and a fitting tribute to this man who was my soul mate. We had been married for 64 years. I’m so thankful he didn’t end up in a nursing home.

“But life goes on. And while the world stands on the brink, with devastation and loss of life across the Caribbean and Mexico, Trump made his debut speech before the United Nations General Assembly, a 40-minute rant attacking socialism and communism and ‘rogue states’ Iran, Venezuela and Cuba. He openly threatened to wipe North Korea off the face of the earth, a nation that can barely feed its people and yet has to defend itself against an onslaught of Western hostility, ferocious UN sanctions and ongoing US/South Korean war games.

“America’s historical destruction of North Korea and today’s ongoing threats should be considered in the context of the living memory of its older generation. Pyongyang, a city of half-a-million people before 1950, at the end of hostilities had only two buildings left intact.

“Trump’s UN tirade was tailored for Americans who were born yesterday. It will go down in history as a marker of the final collapse of a terminally corrupt and rotten regime where any pretense of global co-operation has gone. And yet our local media hacks felt it was more important to treat his words with amusement and then headline a stupid story about a Tasmanian who shoved Abbott in the guts.

“But Trump is merely a ventriloquists’ dummy who read from a teleprompter transmitting to Americans words written by the Generals, all of them a distortion of historical fact. In a sane world, UN delegates should have handcuffed Trump and hauled him before a criminal court and shouted him down or walked out instead of listening to his litany of lies.

“The US has become the 4th Reich and we question whether the world can survive its brutal foreign policy. To our great shame, Australia supported his psychopathic threats, already up to our neck in America’s war crimes around the world. No wonder we’re on the skids. Amongst the world leaders, there was one who almost exceeded Trump in its mendacity and malignancy. Benjamin Netanyahu. For Israel’s leader, lying has become a creed.

“Robert Fisk honed in on Trump’s warped view of WW2 pointing out that it was Russia that bore the brunt of Hitler’s Wehrmacht and it was Russia’s destruction of Hitler’s military power that broke the Nazis. And it was Stalin who’d been pleading for a Second Front for two years. When Hitler marched into Poland and Norway and Holland and Belgium and Luxembourg and then France and threatened to invade Britain, the United States enjoyed a profitable period of neutrality - as it did for most of WW1 - until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, more than two years after WW2 began. We should also remember that it was Hitler who then declared war on the US, not the other way round.

“John Pilger writes about a heavily publicized recent TV series on ‘The Vietnam War’ shown on America’s highly corporatized PBS network (the ’P’ stands for Pentagon and Petroleum) directed by Lynn Novick and Ken Burns, experts at whitewashing the crimes of US imperialism. Their biggest backer, the Bank of America.

“The title itself is absurd. The Vietnamese called it ‘The American War’ which broadens the geographic lens to include Laos and Cambodia, when the world’s most powerful military empire invaded and assaulted a small peasant nation and its neighbors for more than a decade, spraying millions of tons of Agent Orange on to forests and crops ravaging and poisoning a once bountiful land, and frying human beings with napalm. No mention of Vietnamese dead, only Americans, justifying one of the great crimes of the 20th century, all too familiar to those who observe the close relationship between Hollywood and the Pentagon and the CIA (with 70 years of high crimes under its belt).

“The rewriting of history never stops and the blood never dries, it seems, with the bloodthirsty invader purged of guilt, legitimizing subsequent wars of aggression. As Pilger writes: ‘The true scandal is the insidious assumption of power by sinister warmaking vested interests for which no American voted’…an historic shift of power in Washington.

"But where are the angry people? Where are the protests? Bishop Desmond Tutu put it this way. ‘If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.’

“Joan Coxsedge”

Does Cambridge's Draper Laboratory's Work For Trump's Pentagon Violate Nuremberg Accords and International Law?

According to Principle VI of the 1950 Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunals, “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances” are “crimes against peace.” And according to Principle VII of the 1950 Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunals, “complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity as set forth in Principle VI is a crime under international law.”

Yet at 555 Technology Square in the “Warmakers’ Republic of Cambridge” some of the folks at the “non-profit” Draper Laboratory who have apparently been personally enriching themselves by working for the U.S. military-industrial-university complex’s “permanent war machine” in the 21^st-century are still being allowed by the “People’s Republic of Cambridge” to now do weapons technology development work for the Trump administration’s Pentagon in 2017—even if such war preparation research violates international law and helps prepare the Pentagon for a possible Trump administration military attack on North Korea.

Who Rules "Warmarkers' Republic of Cambridge"'s Draper Laboratory?

Sitting next to Scowcroft Group Principal Franklin Miller on the “non-profit” Draper Laboratory board of directors in recent years have been folks like the following people:

John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory Director Emeritus Richard Roca, who was paid $45,000 between June 2015 and July 2016 for sitting on Draper Laboratory’s board of directors;

Escalade Inc. Chairman of the Board, G-III Apparel Group Director and Oppenheimer & Co. Managing Director Richard D. White, who was paid $40,824 between June 2015 and July 2016 for sitting on Draper Laboratory’s board of directors;

Former Lockheed Martin Space Systems Executive Vice-President and CommScope Holdings, Visteon and Tetra Tech Inc. corporate board member Joanne Maguire, who was paid $39,628 between June 2015 and July 2016 for sitting on Draper Laboratory’s board of directors;

Former Lockheed Martin Vice-President and former Aerospace Corporation CEO and current OSI Systems Director William Ballhaus, Jr., who was paid $37,000 between June 2015 and July 2016 for sitting on Draper Laboratory’s board of directors;

Harvard Business School Senior Lecturer, former Fidelity Investments Vice-President and General Counsel and BlackRock Equity-Bonds Funds Director Lena Goldberg, who was paid $33,895 between June 2015 and July 2016 for sitting on Draper Laboratory’s board of directors;

MIT Professor and Singapore MIT Alliance for Research and Technology CEO/Director Daniel Hastings, who’s also a trustee of the Aerospace Corporation that “operates a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) for the United States Air Force” which provides “engineering and acquisition management support as well as objective technical analyses and assessments to the Air Force,” according to the Aerospace Corporation’s website. And between June 2015 and July 2016, Aerospace Corporation Trustee and MIT Professor Hastings was paid $31,500 for sitting on Draper Laboratory’s board of directors.

Former Central Intelligence Agency Operative and former Deputy Director and Acting Director of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency David Shedd, who was paid $7,625 between June 2015 and July 2016 for sitting on Draper Laboratory’s board of directors;

Flybridge Captal Partners General Partner David Arnoff, of the Boston and New York-based speculation/venture capital investment firm, who was paid $6,125 between June 2015 and July 2016 for sitting on Draper Laboratory’s board of directors; and

Lt. General Frank Kearney, a former Deputy Combatant Commander for United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM) who “served in operational and command assignments at every level with combat tours in Grenada, Panama, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan” and “commanded all Theater Special Operations forces in the middle-east including OIF and OEF from March 2005 to June 2007”, according to the Thayer Leader Development Group at West Point’s website, before setting up his own “consulting” company, Inside-Solutions-LLC, of which he is president. And between June 2015 and July 2016, Lt. General (Ret.) and Inside-Solutions President Kearney was paid $6,125 for sitting on Draper Laboratory’s board of directors.